An early memory of the first memory.

Local history for local people.

Tom Kilburn built the Manchester computer. Why didn’t Alan Turing get on with him?

Banana splits and pathetic fallacies

More perverse Manchester pleasures.

Abandoned trams and bitcoin railways.

On the men who started the witchhunt, and the homophobia still present in Cambridge.

A Bletchley Park secret: they wasted their women.

They might drop a suitcase on your head. If they’re J Robert Oppenheimer.

A mini-meditation on the attraction — and grotesquery — of Turing artefacts.

Bertha Swirles, Phyllis Lockett, Cicely Popplewell, Audrey Bates, and Mary Lee Woods. Did Manchester University computing did first create and then lose female expertise?

Paul Nash’s brand of southern English surrealism has had a resurgence in the last few years. But he was never neglected, and a 1948 Nash exhibition in Manchester was one of the visual highlights of the city, according to one of Turing’s closest friends.

Manchester bus fog tricycle. That’s all.

Alan Turing’s Manchester has been many years in the making. My intention is to use this blog as a way of sharing some of the material that didn’t make it into the book. So it’s appropriate to start with an image I first saw 30 years ago, in King’s College Cambridge, and didn’t understand. I still don’t quite understand it…